So if you’ve been following our blog you’ve seen that this round’s theme is interacting with the writing adage “write what you know.” I’ll go ahead and play devil’s advocate and agree that yes, we should do this! Here’s why:
1. If you are writing with authenticity informed by true experience, your reader will recognize your writerly authority. For example, if you’ve experienced, say, the loss of a pet, and you write about, say, the loss of a friend, your reader is likely to be touched by that scene, either from empathy for the character or with sympathy from similar experience. You don’t have to write “exactly” the same thing you’ve gone through, but you can translate your personal experiences into fodder for good scenes.
2. If you don’t know something but you want to, learn it! There is very little limitation to what we can learn these days. From scouring the internet to traveling the world, there are about a million ways to broaden your horizons. So dig deep, do the research, experience something new — and you, too, can make the “what you know” category a little bigger every day.
Jobe
J. Jobe 